


bono without tears

by further



Category: U2
Genre: Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 18:56:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/further/pseuds/further
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in 1998.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bono without tears

When I was a teenager, I used to have these sex anxiety dreams about trying meet Bono from U2 and something always happening to screw it up. Like in one, we were both at this Lefty fund-raiser charity cocktail party on board a speeding yacht, and Bono was up on the Bridge trying to get the captain to let him drive. I went running up all these flimsy metal stairs to get to him, but we suddenly we hit a severe patch of chop and I was flung overboard and instantly mangled to death in the churning propellers.

In another, I was waiting in a huge, long line to get into a screening of "The Wild Bunch" where Bono was one of a list of different artists getting up before the movie to give little speeches about the genius of Sam Peckinpaw. Bono was the first one on, and there I was still stuck outside the theater waiting. No matter how many people went in, the line before me never got any shorter and I never got any closer to the entrance. Finally, I started to panic and then I freaked, shoving and elbowing my way up through the line. At the entrance, I punched the ticket guy and went bolting into the auditorium only to find, not Bono speaking anymore, but Quentin Tarantino, that creepy blowhard.

How come I decided that these Bono dreams were about sex anxiety was that this fairly insightful guy I once tried to know suggested it to me. Why, he himself had this one recurring dream now and then where he would REALIZE that he was dreaming and could therefore conjure up some sex bomb fantasy girl and proceed to pitch woo to her. But then as soon as he'd get all caught up in the act, he'd forget to stay in charge of the dream and his unconscious mind would change the girl into something awful like a pile of wet mulch or half a jar of warm mayonnaise.

"So, think of Meeting Bono as symbolic of Achieving Orgasm," he explained, shoving his sweaty mitts up my jumper. "And all the shit that gets in your way as symbolic of, uhm, Shit That Gets In Your Way When You're Trying To Achieve Orgasm!"

"Hmmm-" I said, prying his mitts off of me. "The only thing that ever gets in the way of THAT are guys who are fucking me like I'm a half a jar of warm mayonnaise."

Now I know that becoming a teenager's unconscious symbol for having an orgasm isn't every artist's idea of success. Obviously, it should be, but I can't imagine that to the she-devil high school girl rock geeks of today Bono is anything more than some left over unsexy icon of yesteryear the same way Bob Dylan was to me back in the day. And this makes me wonder: Just what the fuck HAPPENED to Bono? Anyways?

I mean, he used to be so cool! You know - back in the 60's?

Or did he just SEEM much cooler then, because I was the lone counter-cultural malcontent of my junior high school and perceived him through a romantic fog of churning adolescent body chemistry, alienation and the potent rocket fuel drug of teenage self-projection? Was it only these things that made the Young Bono so appealing, so rad, so unlike the guys who populated my JD reality? Every school day, I was surrounded by naught but dumb awkward gawky guys my age, guys with acne and tiny baby mustaches all skulking together by the door of the boys lav between classes or after school sitting astride their Huffy bikes in fronta the Dunkin' Donuts, smoking their dad's Winstons. Guys whose idea of flirting was a stammered invite to come "smoke a fatty" in the woods behind the 7-11, or, perhaps would I care to accompany them to the $1 midnight showing of Mad Max this Saturday night? As though a budding young genius like myself would be just DYING to watch them puke up a pilfered 6 of Pabst during the film, then fend off their inexpert boob-grabbing afterward as we wait for their mommy to come pick us up in the family station wagon.

I mean, compared to that, of course BoBo seemed great; one look at him and you just knew he'd never turn to a girl, his chin smeared with popcorn crumbs and fake movie butter and demand a blowjob. He was too busy trying to feed the world and let them know that it's Christmas.

"Not now, darlin' – you save that lovin' for our oppressed brothers and sisters in the Third World!"

Then he'd pull out that big white flag of surrender while the band kicked into one of those great little uncatchy anthems U2 were so good at penning – songs, granted, that you really couldn't dance to, but you could sure march around to 'em in your room with the door locked. Which is more than you could ever say about god damn "Blowin' in the Wind".

And that social consciousness shit really GOT to me when I was little. Sure, I hated everybody I actually knew. But in theory, at least, I considered myself a very pro-human race kinda girl. Though my cheek-sacks may have been full of bitter cynical venom, my brain had a fluffy, pink cotton candy wad center of pure altruist idealism.

So, even though in my day-to-day life, I was all wicked alienated and snickering away in the corner when nobody wanted me for their tumbling partner in gym class, in my heart, I was marching along with Bono, both of us dreaming of a Utopia where there would be no war, there would be no oppression, there would be no gym class.

Another thing that impressed me about the young Bono was that he was "passionate". Every article was I read about U2 told me so - at some point in the interview, there would always come that moment where "passionate" Young Bono would get into a ripping good heat about any number of weighty subjects and blow his stack. It just wasn't a good U2 interview until Bono jumped to his feet and barked out something impetuous like "We love Christ!" or "The boat people can come stay with ME if nobody else will have them!"

Meanwhile, The Other Three Guys would just tense up, grimace and slap themselves across their foreheads in dismay.

Another thing about Young Bono that I dug as a kid was that most other rock stars back then were either withered up, well-behaved geriatrics or shirtless youngsters in leather pants who never did anything but whip their stringy perms around, sing about their cocks and then pass out. Bono's lack of standard rock singer sex peacock posing saved me from all that. You could go mad for him in that sexless way that Catholic girls with hysteria in the 50's used to get crushes from reading The Lives of The Saints. He had this, uhm, virginal male mystique that allowed me to neatly sidestep the whole teen girl penis revulsion thing - you know - that time early on in a girl's adolescence where she hasn't ever really SEEN that many actual penises in person yet, so instead of finding the Male Unit as fascinating as the rest of Western Civilization does, there's this sorta repulsion-fueled curiosity going on more than anything. It's more like how people are about driving by a horrible car accident - sure, slow down and catch an eyeful, but who'd want to be involved? Yikes - too messy!

But not Bono. Bono was the Thinking Girl's Non-Threatening pop star eye candy. O, those many times I'd lie there in my teenage girlish bedroom, gawking at Bono and The Other Three Guys' photos in a magazine and fall into a semi-erotic stupor, thinking about world peace. (It would always be all those Anton Corbjin photos - Anton Corbjin - Rock Photographer, whose name was as mysterious, European and unpronounceable to me as "Daniel Lanois". Corbjin's style was about as far away from sexy as you could get when snapping a photo of a group of strapping young musicians in their physical prime. He always showed bands looking like either young dock worker blokes dressed for a night on the town, refugee urchins or lost, hip naturalists wandering around outside on drugs. Often, Anton would pose U2 standing knee-deep in snow (even though, of course, it never snows in Dublin, their hometown) with the boys gazing off sternly past the camera - as if to say that they had more important things on their minds than some stupid rock band photo-shoot. (Echo and the Bunnymen, meanwhile Anton would shoot from a bit of a distance, all dressed in black, randomly posed on a glacier, adrift in an underground cavern-lagoon or hidden among fake shrubbery under different colored lights from a Youth Hall Disco, as if to say: Art College - It's Not For Everyone.)

I loved That Darn Young Bueno - the way a girl loves a rock star. And although this is worth every promo on Earth, all it took to wreck it forever was seeing them in concert. I was the Joshua Tree, baby. That was when we began to see the New Bono, Bono 2.0, a Bono who, like many European tourists, had fallen in love with the Idea of America- and immediately felt he had a lot to say to America Itself and about how we should try to be more like the Idea of America. This was the gestation of The Modern Bono: a Multimedia Bono.com, a world celebrity Citizen Bono, that Chunky Monkey, Post-Army-Elvis, cartoonishly big dumb Bono of Now. That new school goddamn Bono, with his Vaudevillian shock tactics, his penchant for, uhm, irony, his big fat shiny suit and Jackie O sunglasses.

The Joshua Tree, its videos and everything that happened on the subsequent US tour was one long, painfully drawn out kiss goodbye from U2 to the American Underground that had made them famous in the first place (if you don't believe me, the band filmed it all – important as it was – and you can go rent the video, Rattle and Hum). U2 began Wowing themselves and the rock press by filling colossal arenas, getting on TV a load and burning up the charts with their billion-selling, shit-hot, though still characteristically undanceable hit "With or Without You".

And it was during The Joshua Tree tour that U2 played the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY where I lived and one of my well-meaning friends bought me a ticket for my birthday. It was my very first ever stadium sized rock concert, a tender moment in any girl's maturing process. But for me, as a modern rock bohemian, it was especially poignant, since attending such a show meant compromising my anti-everything convictions, and risking the unforgiving scorn of my post high school peer group.

I wrangled with my conscience a good ten minutes over that before deciding that Bono was worth any sacrifice. Little did I know that what awaited me was a scene far beyond any horror me and my no-goodnik chums and me had imagined a mainstream rock event might be.

My seat was center floor, and it took me half an hour to finally arrive at it after trudging up and down stairs and corridors. Above me hung two massive video screens so people in the nose bleeds could feel not so much as though they were at a rock concert, but as though they were watching one on two TV's in a colossal living room. I stood on my folding metal chair, straining to get a glimpse at U2 as their music ricocheted wildly through-out the acoustically confused sports arena. I remember I looked up at those two tremendous video screens above me and I was confronted with dual close-ups of two 30-foot tall Bono heads. He was wearing a god-damned cowboy hat and what looked like a brass napkin ring in his ear; his giant face was a bloated and sweaty as a boiled hot dog; Ballpark Rock Stars – they plump when ya cook 'em.

Bono did not march at all, but swaggered, holding not a flag but an acoustic 6-string which he couldn't play, trying to coax us into song by strumming out a version of 'People Get Ready' that would have made Kurt Mayfield into a murderer.

My God, I thought, somebody paid actual money to get me in here for this. My blood ran cold, my memory had just been sold. My angel was a centerfold.

I climbed down off my designated folding metal chair and began my way out through the mesmerized tens of thousands, headed for anything that looked like an exit. I fought my way out of the arena, but I could still hear the strains of Kumbaya Sing Along with Thirty-Foot Stereo Bonoheads all the way to my flat.

Back at home, my drunken punk rock housemates were sitting in the kitchenette sipping whiskey like usual and they were amazed to see me back so early. They were also kind of amazed when I went to my bedroom, put on a recording of "Flight of the Valkyries", then went out onto our back-porch, my arms loaded with U2 albums, EP's, bootlegs and singles. One by one I un-sleeved these and unceremoniously launched these now-collectible records like Frisbees off our back porch. They were genuine vinyl records so they shattered with satisfying drama, against the trees behind our house, or else sailed into our neighbor's driveway causing their dog to flip out.


End file.
